Designing for complexity and leadership

My thoughts and experience leading design teams

List of companies I’ve helped with design leadership and design ops:

Mendix, BetterUp, de Bijenkorf, ace & tate, GrandVision, Unilever, Intersport, Wolford, and ECCO.

de Bijenkorf

Leading a highly distributed team of 5 designers, one art director and one researcher. Align the continuous delivery of features (quarterly) with the international business strategy and enable cross-disciplinary teams. Coaching of all team members, hiring strategy and team management (strategy and operations).

OMRON

Co-lead the creation of the new e-commerce solution (Salesforce), stakeholder management and enabling the discovery and concept team with the product and development team (applying agile methods).

Unilever Food Solutions

Enabling cross-disciplinary teams, global stakeholder management, aligning the ideation and design processes with the technical and business strategy (trades, difficult decisions, outsourced dev team…) Leading ideation sessions and product design.

ECCO

Stakeholder management, design strategy and ops (delivery and team) and product design.

How do I generate ideas and direct design work?

Depending on the business strategy and our goals I can come up with a design strategy where the steps of the creation process and the big idea are clearly explained and structured.

During this process I work with product managers, analysts, development leads, marketing, branding and design specialists.

I understand this process as a team effort. My role is to ideate but also strategise and be down-to-earth.

How I mentor, and lead teams?

• Creating a safe space to talk: Being transparent, honest, real and positive.

• Actively listening and assertively communicating with my peers: 1:1 sessions, personal development goals, creating async coaching resources and helping people getting there.

• Being the last one sitting at the lunch table most of the time: I let others do their work by delegating, I stay accountable and move on.

Together with the Product owner we ideate-validate-iterate. We involve the main stakeholders and dev team during this part of the process.

Together we create the final architecture, journey maps, content strategy and main interaction principles. This is when I align with branding and marketing teams.

I come up with a design brief for the design team or, I create all hi-fidelity prototypes for each flow and deliver it to dev team each sprint.